LIDAR reveals ancient city

Debi

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SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA — For decades, archaeologists here kept their eyes on the ground as they tramped through thick jungle, rice paddies and buffalo grazing fields, emerald green and soft with mud during the monsoon season.

They spent entire careers trying to spot mounds or depressions in the earth that would allow them to map even small parts of Angkor, the urban center at the heart of the Khmer empire, which covered a vast region of what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos from roughly A.D. 802 to 1431. In modern times, little material evidence existed beyond a network of monumental stone temples, including the famed Angkor Wat, and the sprawling settlements that presumably fanned out around the temples long since swallowed up by the jungle.

But earlier this year, the archaeologists Shaun Mackey and Kong Leaksmy were armed with a portable GPS device containing data from an aerial survey of the area that is changing the way Angkor is studied. The device led them straight to a field littered with clods of earth and shot through with tractor marks. It looked to the naked eye like an ordinary patch of dirt, but the aerial data had identified it as a site of interest, a mounded embankment where the ancestors of today’s Cambodians might have altered the landscape to build homes.

Almost immediately after stepping onto the field, Mr. Mackey, his eyes glued to the ground, pounced on a shard of celadon pottery. Soon the team had turned up a small trove of potsherds and began taking copious notes.

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An aerial lidar image of Ta Prohm, founded in the late 12th century. Credit Damian Evans/Journal of Archaeological Science
“It’s not sexy, like a temple, but for an archaeologist it’s really interesting that we have this representation of cultural activity,” he said. He and Ms. Kong Leaksmy are part of a consortium of scholars called the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI), which uses a technology known as lidar to shoot ultraquick pulses of light at the ground from lasers mounted on helicopters. The way they bounce back can show the presence of subtle gradations in the landscape, indicating places where past civilizations altered their environment, even if buried beneath thick vegetation or other obstructions.

The soft-spoken, fedora-clad Mr. Mackey, a 14-year veteran of fieldwork here, noted that before lidar’s availability, an accurate ground survey of archaeological features in the Cambodian landscape entailed years or even decades of work.

“We’ve all spent hours getting clawed and shredded by bamboo forests with thorns or dense scrub and bush, in the hope that we might find something,” Mr. Mackey said.
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Finding the past buried beneath us is amazing. It would be really interesting to have the planet "surveyed" this way and get a picture of what we once looked like!
 
Its pretty amazing what LIDAR ( Light Detection and Ranging) can do. I wonder how much of the video shown above is direct from LIDAR verses human interpreted animation .
 
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This is truly fastenating. There's so much jungle there it would be impossible to get this kind of info. Good treasure hunting tool